Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) This page may give an answer to your questions. I hope you have contributions 1) Why should I use the Mail::Box::Manager? You can process folders using the Mail::Box::Mbox and Mail::Box::MH objects, without a Mail::Box::Manager. However, using the manager, your application will work for any kind of folder because the manager will autodetect the type, and because all folder objects share the same interface! Besides, the manager protects you from opening the same folder twice (which may cause `inconvenience'), and can create message threads. 2) What are threads? Very confusing, the word `thread' in mail folders has nothing to do with the threads of Perl and UNIX. Some operating systems (and Perl) have give one program the possibility to start multiple sub-programs within itself. These are called `process-threads', or `threads' for short. However, in our context, we speak about `message-threads', which describe the relationships between messages. Each message may contain the message-id of a message it is in reply to. Usually they also contain a list of references to all messages with the same subject and a logical follow-up. Mail::Box is able to give simplified access to `message threads' (`threads' for short) via the Mail::Box::Manager. 3) How can it be that Mail::Box folders show less messages in the folder than other applications do? Because Mail::Box has support for reading e-mail per thread, it keeps an index based on message-id. Every message shall have a unique message-id, so when the same id is found again, that message considered to be a copy and ignored. By the way: this may remove a lot of spam ;) 4) How can I fight SPAM? Mail::Classifier is a package based on Mail::Box, which can be trained to recognize Spam. SpamAssassin is a rule based spam filter, and can be used via Mail::Box::Search::SpamAssassin